The Office of Undergraduate Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity (URSCA) is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Leroy Myers as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Research Administration and Student Mentorship, effective May 1, 2024.
Dr. Myers is a historian specializing in African American and Native American history, whose research interests include African American migration to the American West during the 19th and early 20th centuries, enslaved/African American community-building, Native American slavery and captivity, and African American and Native American relations.
A Baltimore native, Dr. Myers earned his B.A., magna cum laude, from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, where he majored in History and conducted thesis research on Native Americans in U.S. popular culture in the 1990s. He then enrolled in the University of Oklahoma, where he earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in History. His M.A. thesis examined the development of Oklahoma’s Black towns, while his doctoral dissertation explored the impact of Black migration on Oklahoma in the decades leading up to its statehood in 1907. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Hell and the Promised Land: Black Migration West to Kansas.
In addition to publishing and presenting his research and teaching U.S. history at the college level, Dr. Myers has long been engaged in public humanities. He has worked in the Western History Collections at the University Oklahoma, the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and the Maryland Center for History and Culture, and has curated public exhibitions on such themes as the cultural iconography of the West, Black activism, and LGBTQ activism.
We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Myers to Hopkins and especially to URSCA because of his deep commitment to undergraduate research. In teaching U.S. history for more than seven years, he has trained countless students in conducting primary source research. Several of his students have won awards for the essays they produced in his classes, and in recognition of his successful mentorship, he was invited to speak on the panel “Doing Undergraduate Research in Early American Studies” at the Society of Early Americanists’ annual meeting.
As the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Myers will teach in our summer Humanities Collaboratory, which invites a select group of community college students and first-year students from MSIs to spend 10 weeks at Johns Hopkins developing their skills as humanities researchers. Dr. Myers is especially suited to this role, as he participated in similar summer programs when he was an undergraduate. He credits his experience in the Schomburg Summer Humanities Institute and the Ralph Bunche Summer Humanities Institute with showing him the power and possibility of pursuing knowledge according to one’s own passions and inspiring him to attend graduate school.
During the academic year, Dr. Myers will organize a series of humanities lectures and symposia in coordination with area community colleges, HBCUs, and MSIs, and will develop initiatives to strengthen our institutional and community connections around humanities research. He will also take over as managing editor of the Macksey Journal and will be involved in all other aspects of URSCA programming and mentorship. We look forward to the new strengths and perspectives he will bring to our team.